For decades, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the promotion and performance of new and improvised music, collaborating with a host of new music luminaries including Robert Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff, and many others. Buckner has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Spring Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Angelica Festival of Bologna. He is featured on over 50 recordings, including six solo albums, the most recent being “New Music for Baritone & Chamber Ensemble,” which includes works by Annea Lockwood, Tania Leon, and Petr Kotik. Buckner also appears on the CD/DVD “Kirili et le Nymphéas (Hommage à Monet)” filmed at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, which houses Monet’s celebrated Water Lilies murals. For the past thirty years, Buckner has curated the Interpretations series in New York City and continues to produce recordings on the Mutable Music label, introducing current artists and repertoire as well as presenting important historic material, previously unavailable in CD format.
Asha Sheshadri moves freely between video, writing, sound, and photography. Her forms flow together to create unpredictable observations of the overlooked, while documenting personal and political networks within our collective, imperfect memory. Her recent work has been released through Recital, Anomia, HOLD, and Entr'acte. She currently lives and works in New York.
Julie Ezelle Patton is a sculptor of sound, image and text. Her poetics take the form of found object assemblage, scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, ephemeral libraries, and site-specific installations. Patton bridges musical and literary improvisations in performances emphasizing collaborative “in-the-moment” compositions and otherworldly chora-graphs. Her noted Womb Room Tomb installation honoring her mother, Virgie Ezelle Patton (1928-2015) was featured in The Front International Triennial 2018. Patton is the author of Notes For Some (Nominally) Awake. She has performed at numerous venues and festivals including the Stone, Jazz Standard, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia, and The Kitchen. She has collaborated with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and composers such as Nasheet Waits, Abou Farman, Vinie Burrows, Henry Hills, Sally Silvers & Bruce Andrews, the late Henry Grimes and Anne Waldman. She performs with composer/instrumentalist Janice Lowe and improvising guitarist Paul Van Curen in the group Rock Paper Sisters.
Mike Pollard: Nina Protocol (2021-present), Fpbjpc (2014-present), Svetlana Gallery (2020), Arbor Records (2004-2012)
Eric Schmid is a philosopher of math, artist, and musician based in Chicago.
Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a sound artist and musician based in New York. They work with synthesis, electronics, and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long-form compositions and improvised live performances. Their music lately engages the private experiences that shape domestic and public spaces, and the affective dynamics within childcare work. They have released albums with She Rocks! (New York), and Reading Group (New York), with a full-length release forthcoming on Recital. They have performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, Bar Laika by e-flux, Performance Space New York, Center for Performance Research, Cafe OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), and in DIY spaces and galleries throughout the US. Recent commissioned works include Attached/Detached (partial disappearance) for ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work series and original music for artist Nile Koetting’s installation Downtime Salon at Musik Installationen in Nuremberg. They are a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room and an MFA candidate in Music/Sound at Bard College.
Nour Mobarak's work uses poetic strategies to investigate how systems become entangled and mutate. Working with voice, language, mycelium, sound, and memory, she considers how processes such as time, decay, and symbiosis change the ontology of things, and how she as an artist senses that change. How is the reality of what she's presenting ephemeral or unstable? Mobarak has released music through Recital, Ultra Eczema, and The Tapeworm, and has performed at such locations as the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), LAXArt (Los Angeles), Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York), Stadslimeit (Antwerp), Cambridge University (Cambridge), and the Getty Museum (Los Angeles). She has published poems in journals such as F.R. David, The Claudius App, and The Salzburg Review,and has participated in exhibitions at the Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York), JOAN (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), and Rodeo Gallery (London), among others.
